The word that best fits my day today is self-aggrandize.
To aggrandize is to make great or greater or, as I’ve heard it used most commonly, to make appear great or greater. According to my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, it comes from the French agrandir by way of the Latin grandire, to increase. Both of those words find their root in the Latin grandis, meaning “great.”
To self-aggrandize is to make oneself seem greater than one really is. In my opinion, there’s a heck of a lot of self-aggrandizement that goes on at this school and in academia writ large, and I’m awful sick of it.
It’s not that I don’t understand. I do. I often find myself puffing up for inspection, making the effort to appear completely in control, even projecting the image of excelling at everything I do. I live in pretty near constant fear (not crippling fear, mind you, but fear) that someone will pull back the curtain and see I’m really not qualified to be where I am or do what I’m doing. Some day, you’ll all find out I’m a charlatan.
As insecure and possibly unhealthy as that makes me sound, careful observation has shown me that almost everyone at this school is the same way. “Fake it ’til you make it” could be the motto of the graduate school. Where this gets to be a problem, however, is when students aren’t sure if their educators are also inflating.
I have loved working in my newsroom and it has been, on the whole, a truly fantastic experience. I would recommend this school and the print/digital media track without hesitation to anyone who thinks it might be a fit for them. That said, I’ve been upset this past week with what I see as unnecessary and unprofessional conduct from certain superiors to their subordinates. (Not mine, I’d like to say. This is all outside observation, so I could be off-base. I don’t think I am, though.)
We’re all only human, I know. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. But I have always held educators to a higher standard, perhaps an unreasonable one. Educating requires a certain selflessness and recognition of the fact that teachers give over so much of themselves for the greater cause of knowledge. I feel that some in the newsroom need to be reminded that their duties as teachers are as, or more, important than their duties as editors. They need to deflate a little, give up a little of the power trip and approach the concept that their holding our grades and professions in their hands from the position of nurturer rather than overseer.
We’re students; that puts us in a vulnerable position. But we wouldn’t be paying to study theory and ideals if we didn’t want to. An editor here is not supposed to crush us deep down where we’re still green and hopeful. That’s the job of other editors in the real world; that’s our own job as we strike our personal balances between the ideals of the Journalist’s Creed and the cruel, capricious world.
I want my hopes and spirits high at the start, so that I’ll still have something left when they inevitably fall. Maybe that’s just me. Could we just aggrandize and make the newspaper greater, instead of self-aggrandizing and making it petty?
